It was once true, back in the olden days (the mythical 60's), that the record companies were either indie labels or side trips of larger corporations; and since rock was the undiscovered territory, no one really knew what would sell. Hence, we got such wonders as Electric Music For The Mind And body, Freakout, Forever Changes.....
Any examples you can share would be cool...either of accidental genius or idiotic missteps.
Nowadays it's all about squeezing the creativity out of every dollar to get a hit.
One fine example is WILCO's 500,000+ seller "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"....
Wilco garnered media attention for its fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), and the controversy surrounding it. After the recording sessions were complete, Reprise Records rejected the album and dismissed Wilco from the label. As part of a buy-out deal, Reprise gave Wilco the rights to the album for free. After streaming Foxtrot on its website, Wilco sold the album to Nonesuch Records in 2002. Both record labels are subsidiaries of Warner Music Group, leading one critic to say the album showed "how screwed up the music business is in the early twenty-first century."[1] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is Wilco's most successful release to date, selling over 670,000 copies.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a critical and commercial success, and is their best selling album, with over 500,000 copies sold in the U.S. and topping the Pazz and Jop critics' poll for 2002. Critical success endured, and the album was widely listed among the greatest albums of the 2000s in many popular publications. It was Wilco's first album with drummer Glenn Kotche, and the last with multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Jay Bennett.
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In 2001, AOL merged with Time Warner to form AOL Time Warner. Time Warner's market share of the music industry had dropped by almost five percent from the mid-1990s, and the new executives ordered the termination of six hundred jobs. One of those jobs was Reprise Records president Howie Klein, who had been a big supporter of Wilco on the label. Klein's dismissal caused head A&R representative David Kahne to be in charge of deciding whether to release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Kahne assigned A&R representative Mio Vukovic to monitor the progress of the album. Vukovic was unhappy about the album because he felt that his suggestions were not being considered. Kahne wanted a radio single from the album, but he felt that none of the songs were suitable for commercial release. In June 2001, the album was officially rejected and Vukovic suggested that the band independently release the album.[9]
Josh Grier, Wilco's lawyer, was able to negotiate a buy-out of the band from Reprise. The band would keep the rights to the album if they paid Reprise $50,000. Before Wilco could accept the deal, Reprise called the band and changed their offer to give the band the rights to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for free. Despite Reprise's efforts to accommodate Wilco's departure, the process marred public relations after an article in the Chicago Tribune described what had happened.[10]
Wilco had planned on releasing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on September 11, 2001, but Tweedy did not want a change in record labels to significantly delay the release of the album. Within weeks of being released from the label and Jay Bennett leaving the band, MP3s of all tracks from the album began to appear on file sharing networks. In a decision aimed at discouraging the pirating of lower quality MP3s and having some control over how the album was distributed, on September 18, 2001, Wilco began streaming the entirety of the album on their official website. The wilcoworld.net website registered over fifty thousand hits that day, eight times as much as typical daily traffic. Traffic to the website quadrupled the normal traffic over the next few months. The following tour was a success financially, and members of Wilco observed that fans sang along with unreleased songs on the album.
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